I can assure you that there will be no greater contrast on Yale’s campus this November than the one in the lobby of The Study Hotel, where, interspersed with the slick, modern furniture and continental decor, resides the The Yale Undergraduate Photography Society’s dazzling fall exhibition. But this contrast isn’t simply the fact that such a vibrant show currently occupies a hotel. In fact, what is at the core of the exhibit is a rigorous demonstration of the capacity of photography to be an immensely diverse medium. Variety of geographical location, variety of compositional qualities, variety of mood: variety of all varieties is, ultimately, the unifying thread to the exhibition.
To give you an idea of the kind of diversity I’m talking about, think an image of a sunset in Southampton placed next to a scene from the Serengeti. Simply in terms of geography, the exhibit will transport you
from a beauty store on Chapel Street to a martial arts show in Beijing, from a temple in Bhutan to a chapel in Stockholm. If the photos weren’t so deeply rooted in the places in which they were taken, the show might strain beneath the weight of its own ambition. The take-away may well have been so flat and vapid as, “Wow, Yale students are really well-traveled.”
Thankfully, this isn’t the case. Instead, what’s perhaps even more striking than the show’s geographic variety is its range of mood and composition. There are images of intensity, like Meg McHale’s, BK ’17, stark photo of two boys heading to work in the fields after school. The boys’ tense yet resolute expressions, coupled with McHale’s revealing title, “Men,” convey the sense of desperate urgency beating beneath the image’s surface. There are also images of exultant repose, like co-curator (along with Alice Oh, PC ’19) Kaitlin Cardon’s, TD ’19, “Berber in the Sahara,” in which an ornately-clad drummer watches as his music inspires jubilation. As far as compositional variety goes, one particularly arresting example is the juxtaposition of the gritty realism of Rebecca Finley’s, SM ’20, “Pretty in Punk,” in which a young woman blows a gum-bubble, with Rosie Shaw’s, CC ’20, “Home—,” a honey-lit pastoral scene practically dripping with warmth and nostalgia. By eschewing any sense of thematic continuity, the exhibition affirms its central purpose of revealing the expansive yet infinitely personal nature of photography.
As Susan Sontag remarked in the essay “Melancholy Objects,” “The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.” If you make it to The Study this November—as I hope you do—you will no doubt experience the truth of Sontag’s words. More than simply being the cheapest worldwide adventure around (save, maybe, for Around The World in 80 Days), this exhibition will provide you with the rare opportunity to slip into another’s shoes so that you may return to your own with a new perspective.